My Last Innocent Year(67)

My mother leaned over and inspected my work. “You have to take it out. Down to here.” She pointed to a spot just above the ribbing.

“To there?” I whined. “I might as well take out the whole thing!”

She paused, peering over the top of her glasses. “Yeah. You might as well.”

I did what she suggested, complaining the whole time. But she was right, as mothers often are, particularly in the years we are least inclined to listen to them: you can always start over in knitting, something you can never do in life. There is no such thing as a clean slate. We take our decisions with us, no matter how much we wish we could leave them behind.

I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror. Elaine was right: I looked more like my mother every day.

I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I took my time getting ready. I put on a short-sleeved button-down shirt, khaki shorts, a pair of gold studs. I brushed my hair, put on lip gloss, placed a dab of perfume behind each ear. I went to look for my mother’s watch, but it wasn’t there. Then I pictured it, on the floor of Connelly’s bathroom, resting in the space between the toilet and the sink, and that was when I started to cry because I knew even then that I would never get it back.

The phone rang again. This time, I decided to answer it. If it was Andy, I’d tell him—well, I wasn’t sure what I’d tell him.

But it wasn’t Andy. It was Abe.

“Isabel? Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine.” It was a relief to hear his voice. Abe went over the details of his upcoming trip. He’d found a room at a motel off the highway, nothing fancy but it was okay. Should we make a dinner reservation for Saturday night? And did he need a jacket for the brunch Kelsey’s parents were hosting on Sunday?

“You don’t sound good,” he said in response to another one-syllable answer.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m having a hard day.” And then, to my surprise, I started to cry again.

“Isabel, what is it?”

“Dad, I think I might have made a mistake.”

“Okay.” He sounded nervous. “Do you want to tell me what it is?”

“I can’t.”

Abe took a deep breath. I pictured him in his office in the back of the store, a store he opened and closed each day, then opened and closed again. A desk where he sat and reconciled his receipts, a record of everything he’d been given and everything he’d given away.

“Well,” he said, “here’s what I do when I think I’ve made a mistake. First, I ask myself if it’s something I can fix. And if it’s not, I ask if it’s something I can live with.”

“And what if it isn’t something you can live with?”

“Then I go back and ask myself the first question again.”



* * *



THERE WAS A street in town called Memory Lane. It sounds like a joke, something the alumni office made up to manufacture nostalgia, but it isn’t: maps dating back to the 1890s show the horseshoe-shaped lane running perpendicular to Main Street—a dead end, fittingly enough. On reunion weekends, alumni flocked to take pictures in front of the street sign, their arms linked together or swung over shoulders, clinging to each other like survivors of a shipwreck. We loved making fun of them, these paunchy middle-aged mostly men reliving their youth. Sometimes they’d shout at us as we ran by, ask if we were having fun, if we loved Wilder as much as they did, if we were enjoying every minute. As soon as they were out of earshot, we’d burst out laughing and promise each other we’d never be that lame. But of course we would be. We were the ones who didn’t understand how it worked, pathos, the pull of the past. The sting of regret. Memory Lane didn’t interest us because we didn’t believe in memory. We believed in now.

I didn’t pass any picture takers as I ran through town on my way to the Grand Union, the large, brightly lit supermarket at the end of Main Street. As cold as a walk-in freezer and as big as a convention center, the Grand Union was as far from Rosen’s Appetizing as you could get. Whenever I told Connelly that no one would want to read a book about my dad’s store, it was because of places like this, where no one touched the food or sliced it or weighed it, where everything was tucked inside packages that fit neatly into brown paper shopping bags, where the food didn’t leak onto your hands or leave a smell on your skin. I wandered the wide aisles, past packages of Lender’s bagels and Philadelphia cream cheese, thinking, for some reason, about Lauren Fishman, Barbara’s daughter, the girl with the tire swing and playroom, the girl whose life I wanted so badly when I was eight. The thing about Lauren Fishman, the thing I sometimes forgot, was that she died. An allergic reaction to peanuts when she was fourteen, or maybe a bee sting. Barbara and Stanley divorced a few years later. It was hard for marriages to survive the death of a child, my mother told me at the time. I thought about Lauren whenever I wanted to feel that I had cheated fate, that by not trading lives with her I had somehow earned the life she didn’t get. Or was mine the life destined to go on while Lauren’s fate, peanut or bee be damned, had been to die? Either way, hers was a life I thought I wanted and now it was over. Be careful what you wish for and all that. But I hadn’t learned my lesson, it seemed. I’d never stopped wanting things that weren’t mine.

I finally found what I was looking for: the MISSING poster on the bulletin board behind the registers at the front of the store. Tom’s and Igraine’s faces peered out at me, and this time I looked right back. Outside, the late afternoon sun burned the thin line of scalp where my hair was parted. I walked over to the pay phone on the corner, stuck a dime in the slot, and dialed the phone number I’d scribbled on my hand. The phone rang, and I thought about the time my grandmother’s rabbi stood in front of the congregation on Yom Kippur and squeezed an entire tube of toothpaste onto a plastic tarp. “There are some things you can never take back,” he said. “That is when you must ask for God’s forgiveness.”